Phoenix police positively ID 1992 homicide victim

by William Hermann - Mar. 22, 2011 08:05 PMThe Arizona Republic

A teenage runaway who had no permanent home in her short, troubled life and spent two decades in an unmarked pauper's grave will finally find peace - and a permanent home - thanks to intrepid detective work.

The remains of Shannon Aumock, who was 16 when she died in 1992, were exhumed Tuesday from an unmarked county-cemetery plot in Tempe after a Phoenix police detective figured out her identity. She will be laid to rest in April with a marker bearing her name.

Then, armed with her name, detectives will seek another: that of her killer.

The teen's body was found by recreational cyclists on May 28, 1992, in a heap of brush in a desert area near 26th Street and Deer Valley Road. Homicide detectives had little to go on - not even a name. Her body had been in the desert for as long as eight weeks. It was badly decomposed.

Worse, nobody had reported her missing.

Media reports asked for the public's help. Forensic sketches were handed out. A few leads cropped up. All led nowhere.

And so, Shannon's unidentified body was interred in Maricopa County's cemetery for indigents.

Last year, Phoenix police Detective Stuart Somershoe, working missing-persons cold cases, asked himself, "Why has no one come forward, why was no one asking about her?"

Somershoe concluded that she was "one of the 'throwaway' children who go from home to home, perhaps abandoned by her parents."

Somershoe began to sift through about 1,600 reports of runaway children from 1989 through 1992.

"We accounted for about 1,500 of them, and then looked at the 100," he said.

Finally, Somershoe was down to a few names, including Shannon Aumock, born March 2, 1976.

He said Shannon had been born in Arizona to a 16-year-old mother who, unable to care for her, had turned her toddler over to state custody. Shannon was put into a foster home at age 3, but her foster parents found the child difficult to help. When she was 10, they told state Child Protective Services they could not control her.

"Shannon ran away from group homes, foster homes, everywhere, more than 40 times, and we have those reports," Somershoe said. "After late 1991, no more reports."

Somershoe located Shannon's biological mother, whom police have not identified but who still lives in Arizona. Detectives got a DNA sample from her and asked the Phoenix police crime lab to compare it to DNA taken from the corpse found in the desert.

It was a match.

Somershoe went to the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office, which recently received a National Institute of Justice grant called Identifying the Unidentified. The goal is to give a name to every John and Jane Doe buried without an identity.

Forensic anthropologist Laura Fulginiti established the girl's burial site at the county cemetery in west Tempe, and on Tuesday, Fulginiti, forensic dentist Dr. John Piakis, and police detectives exhumed the body.

Fulginiti, Piakis and their team painstakingly reopened the grave that so long ago had been covered, removing the once nameless bones and examining them. They determined through dental records it was Shannon, then put her remains beneath a blue blanket on a gurney. They and two detectives, all as pallbearers, wheeled the gurney to a mortuary van.

"We have a dream of getting everyone buried with their name, and now we will with Shannon," Fulginiti said.

Somershoe was one of the Phoenix detectives acting as a pallbearer. The other was homicide Detective Barry Giesemann.

He said there is an active homicide investigation to find the person who murdered Shannon.

"Our goal now is to put out photos of Shannon and hope we get people to come forward, to develop new leads," Giesemann said.

But before that, "Shannon will receive a proper burial, with her grave marked with her name," said police spokesman Trent Crump. "She deserves at least that."

Anyone with information regarding Shannon Aumock can call investigators at 602-262-6141 or 480-WITNESS.